CHAPTER 8

PLAGUE!


In the control room the interstellar radio and teletype-translator were
silent. The red light on the call board was still blinking; Tiger turned
it off with a snap. "Here's the message that just came in, as near as I
can make out," he said, "and if you can make sense of it, you're way
ahead of me."

The message was a single word, teletyped in the center of a blue
dispatch sheet:

GREETINGS

"This is all?" Jack said.

"That's every bit of it. They repeated it half a dozen times, just like
that."

"_Who_ repeated it?" Dal asked. "Where are the identification symbols?"

"There weren't any," said Tiger. "Our own computer designated 31 Brucker
from the direction and intensity of the signal. The question is, what do
we do?"

The message stared up at them cryptically. Dal shook his head. "Doesn't
give us much to go on, that's certain. Even the location could be wrong